Tantalizer 465: Decline and fall

Paul Pennyfeather, you will recall from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, was sent down from Oxford and went to teach in Dr Fagan’s horrid school at Llanaba Abbey. There he found that a class of the beastliest boys could be kept quiet till break by offering a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of all possible merit. Now read on:

“Sir”, remarked Clutterbuck after break, “I claim the prize”.

“But you”, Paul protested feebly, “have written only one-third as many words as Ponsonby, one-fifth as many as Briggs and one-eighth as many as Tangent”.

“Nonetheless, Sir, Dr Fagan would certainly wish me to have the prize”.

And so it proved. You might also like to know that the oldest of these four boys wrote 2222 more words than the second oldest and used more full stops in his essay than any of them who wrote less words than the youngest.

Where was Clutterbuck in the order of age, and how many words did he write?

(c) for any boy X who wrote fewer words than the youngest boy, the oldest boy used more full stops than X

Again this means that the oldest boy cannot have written fewer words than the youngest boy, and so eliminates cases [1a], [1b], [2a].

For [2b] there are no other boys who wrote fewer words than they youngest boy, and the convention for universal quantification over the empty set is that it is vacuously true, so in this interpretation we have a single answer:

Congratulations, Jim, on your interpretation of wording that appears to be deliberately obscure.
In any case, grammar requires that one write fewer words, not “less words”. Words are discrete and countable objects, not something that is measured by the kilogram or the litre.
Is the distinction too subtle for New Scientist?